Marketoonist is a weekly cartoon and essay series created by 🏷️#cartoonist and 🏷️#marketer Tom Fishburne that uses hand-drawn humor to diagnose why marketing underperforms — read by half a million business professionals weekly.
Tom Fishburne began drawing cartoons on the backs of 📝Harvard Business School (HBS) cases and launched Marketoonist in 2002 from a cubicle at General Mills, initially emailing the strip to coworkers. The series has since been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and The New York Times, appeared twice on Times Square billboards, and runs as a weekly column in Marketing Week since 2007. Fishburne is the only cartoonist graduate of Harvard Business School and served as Cartoonist-in-Residence at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In 2010, Fishburne expanded Marketoonist into a content marketing studio working with more than 200 organizations including Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn — using cartoons as a vehicle for internal culture change and audience engagement. He has delivered over 200 keynote talks in more than 30 countries and spoke at TED on the power of laughing at ourselves. His book Your Ad Ignored Here collects the strip's sharpest observations on marketing dysfunction.
The strip's enduring argument is that most marketing failure is cultural, not tactical. Each cartoon functions as a diagnostic — holding up a mirror to organizational dynamics, flawed personalization, technology theater, and the gap between data and action. The "Just Circling Back" cartoon (May 2026) captures the uncanny valley of AI-driven outreach: tools designed to sound human that instead signal their own artificiality.
I love the humor of Marketoonist and consider it a required subscription for anyone in marketing and tech as a means to keep you grounded as the strip keeps naming the exact failure modes we're trying to avoid at scale.